Reddit Reddit reviews Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science

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Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science
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1 Reddit comment about Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science:

u/yakri · 0 pointsr/DebateReligion

This is exactly what we're talking about right here.

>Pascal’s Wager

>The Authority of the Bible

>Quality of Life

Calling these arguments at all is very generous. Pascals wager comes the closest to being taken seriously but has multiple fatal flaws, such as the fact that if there is no God and you take him up on his wager so to speak, you waste your entire existence, making it a poor bet. Then there's the many gods problem as well.

>The Actionable Conclusion

This is neither an argument, nor supporting of a belief in God.

>Personal Experience

Hume has an excellent response to most of what could be considered an argument in here. However most of what you've written here does not constitute an argument, and should not rationally be enough to convince anyone else. It certainly doesn't qualify as, " any rational argument, supported by evidence."

>Kalam's Cosmological Argument

For the sake of time, I'm going to refer you to the wikipedia article here. There are numerous problems with the KCA, none of which can be satisfactorily resolved, and it does not have any supporting evidence. Since the argument is not logically sound, valid, and non-vacuous, it isn't taken seriously in modern debate except for it's role in the history of philosophy.

>Aristotle’s Cosmological Argument

This is no stronger than the KCA above, and has many of the same problems. It doesn't prove a God exists even if true, has no supporting evidence, and must resort to special pleading for the "first cause" to not have a cause itself.

>The Fine Tuned Universe Argument

This is probably the only argument in the batch that's even taken seriously at all, but it has the most problems, probably due to being more well-defined and claiming it has supporting evidence (which none of the rest can).


  1. This is a new iteration of the "God of the Gaps" fallacy, which is often considered by both theologians and Atheists to be logically fallacious .

  2. There is not any good reason to believe that the universe is actually 'finely tuned' in the first place. The puddle analogy is a great way to think of this
    >Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, “This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!”

  3. Life as we know it could exist under substantially different cosmological constants than exist in our universe, implying that the supposed 'fine tuning' of our universe is just one possible set of options in a wide band in which life and the universe as we know it, could actually exist.

  4. Much like with intelligent design arguments, fine tuning arguments suffer greatly from the fact that the universe is actually pretty shittily designed for intelligent life to flourish, and it could be vastly improved even to the eye of a mere human.

  5. The fine tuning argument is based on faulty probabilistic reasoning

  6. Fine tuning is insufficient to prove any kind of creator with agency, even if correct. It's possible that this could be an inevitable outcome, predicated on some universal law of physics unknown to us.

    If you want more supporting evidence against fine tuning/god of the gaps, wikipedia has almost everything you could possibly want cited, and Victor Stenger has written a sound rebuttal to it and all common counter arguments within God: The Failed Hypothesis.